Development and Usability Testing of an Exercise-Based Primary Care Fall Prevention Clinical Decision Support Tool

Area of Science:

• Gerontology
• Health Informatics
• Primary Care Medicine

Background:

• Falls are a leading cause of injury and death in older adults.
• Current primary care practices often fail to adequately address fall risk management and prevention exercise referrals.
• Health information technology offers potential solutions to bridge this gap in care.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the development and usability testing of a clinical decision support (CDS) tool designed for fall prevention exercise.
• To evaluate the prototype's usability among primary care team members.

Main Methods:

• Employed human-centered design and rapid qualitative analysis for tool development.
• Conducted usability testing with primary care team members.
• Utilized the Health-Information Technology Usability Evaluation Scale (Health-IT USE) for data collection.

Main Results:

• The CDS prototype achieved a median usability score of 5.0 on the Health-IT USE scale.
• The mean usability score was 4.5 (SD 0.8), with a range of 4.1-4.9.
• Positive usability feedback was gathered from primary care team members.

Conclusions:

• The developed fall prevention CDS tool demonstrates good usability among primary care providers.
• This technology can potentially assist primary care teams in delivering patient-centered fall prevention care.
• Integrating such tools may improve the implementation of recommended fall prevention strategies.